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Facebook's new feature for blood donors in India

Facebook will roll out a new feature next month to connect blood donors and blood banks with those seeking them. The feature, said Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, was conceived by Indian product developer Hema Budaraju as part of an internal hackathon.

| TNN | Sep 28, 2017, 14:08 IST

Highlights

The service will be introduced on October 1, which is National Blood Donors day.

Facebook users in India will be prompted to edit their profiles to sign up as blood donors.

Representative photo

NEW DELHI: Facebook will roll out a new feature next month to connect blood donors and blood banks with those seeking them. The feature, said Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, was conceived by Indian product developer Hema Budaraju as part of an internal hackathon.
"It can be hard to find a donor or donate to someone outside your network. So we worked with non-profit organizations, blood banks, and donors to build a tool to make it easier to give blood. Donors can register on Facebook and get a notification if a person or an organization nearby needs blood, and people who need donations can be connected to potential donors," Zuckerberg wrote in a status update on Thursday announcing the new feature.

The service will be introduced on October 1, which is National Blood Donors day.

Facebook users in India will be prompted to edit their profiles to sign up as blood donors. They can choose to keep this information private or public. When individuals or organisations are in need of blood, they will be able to create a special interactive post requesting the same. Generating this post will notify donors in the area who can then contact the requestor over Facebook, Messenger or on WhatsApp. As of December 2016, Facebook had 166 million monthly active users in India.

In the note announcing the new feature Budaraju along with Facebook's head of programs in south Asia Ritesh Mehta said that shortage of available blood in hospitals and blood banks can "high-stress situations as people try to find blood donors on their own."

According to Zuckerberg, Budaraju's own experience led to the development of this feature. "This issue is personal to Hema, whose father was diagnosed with cancer five years ago and lost so much blood during chemotherapy that he had to have a transfusion every day for a week," Zuckerberg said in his status update.

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